[coolso]

I think the difference is that we today have a lot more reference points for technological advances than people in the 1960s did.

Just continuing with the storage example, for decades now we've all been witness to data storage sizes growing massively, while the housing of said data storage has shrunk in size tremendously - as has the cost.

So when a couple MB of incredibly slow storage weighs thousands of pounds and costs millions of dollars, I do think the concept of tens/hundreds of GB of super fast flash memory contained within an object the size of a thumbnail would be mindblowing, whereas your example of

>a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)

wouldn't, just because we already all know how far technology has come since the 60s.